Life After Football

Life After Football

Experiences change our lives everyday. We learn from our mistakes or successes in order to define who we are. Everything we do, and all that happens to us, changes who we are. However, there are those experiences that stand out above all others, the ones that have a drastic impact on our life styles, the ones that change how we view the world, and how we view our own lives. Our day-to-day lifestyle changes and we are forced to find new ways to do things, forced to change our views on who we are.

The one specific moment that I can pinpoint in my life that created a drastic change of who I am today occurred last year in late August. It was the first week of school and all I was really focused on was the football game coming up on Friday. I had spent most of my summer weight training and practicing for the upcoming season and I got drastically better than the year before, and was ready for anything. Little did I know what was waiting for me in the game to come. An experience that I never imagined would ever happen to me. An experience that never even crossed my mind…until Friday came.

I managed to get through my first week of school without much trouble. I was ready for the game. I went through my normal pre-game after school. I decided to put on some new spikes on my cleats, since my other ones were pretty dull. This was an action that I will question for the rest of my life. The school we were playing was just down the canal bank that passed by our school, so we marched down in full force

Now on the field we stretched out. Everything was the same as so many times before. We went into the locker room for the 15 minutes till the game started. I got into my crazy mindset, and started rocking back and forth, thinking of how much pain I would invoke on my opponents, and how I would go about doing that. I ran through all of the plays in my head at least once.